How to Take Shortcuts That Work

You don’t have to know how electricity works in order to use it. You just have to know how to turn on or off whatever devices you want to use the runs on electricity. You don’t have to know how an automobile works in order to drive a car either. You don’t really need to understand how gravity, electromagnetism, or the second law of thermodynamics works to feel their effects.

Sometimes the fastest way to produce results is to use a system that someone else built based on the knowledge that they have. You don’t always have to spend countless hours learning and trying to understand what others have already paid the price to learn. You can just take the shortcut.

My good friend Chris Brogan has studied community building using the social media toolkit for decades. I want to use these tools, but I don’t want to learn everything from scratch (or make all the mistakes), so I can just do what Chris recommends.

My friend Charlie Green has studied trust for decades. He’s the world’s foremost authority on trust in selling. I could invest 20,000 hours trying to learn everything the Charlie already learned. Or I could just read and study everything that Charlie has written or sign up for his coaching.

There’s nothing wrong with learning on your own. By all means, study. Go deep. Learn! There’s also nothing wrong with making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. But there’s also no reason not take the shortcut that is studying people who have already know want to know and modeling what is successful.

Most of the time you don’t need the depth of knowledge and understanding that the master’s have gained to start producing better results, you can just model their actions and behaviors. You can start getting the same results. You can do it a lot faster, with a lot fewer mistakes, and with a lot less effort and energy.

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